Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “And you expect me to endure the insolence of this espionage? Whatever your gifts may be, Mr. Jermyn, whether you excel most as prophet, necromancer, or private detective, I must beg you to exercise your talents upon other subjects, and to give me a wide berth.”

  Justin Jermyn responded to this reproof with a hearty laugh. “Nonsense,” he said, “you pretend to be angry, but you are not in earnest. Nobody is ever angry with me. I am a privileged offender. I am everybody’s jester. Let me be your fool. Give me the privileges that emperors of old gave to their jesters. You will find me at worst a better companion than your own thoughts.”

  “They are gloomy enough at the present moment,” said Gerard, subjugated at once by that unknown influence which he had never been strong enough to resist.

  He knew not what the force was by which this young man mastered him, but he knew that the mastery was complete. He was Justin Jermyn’s chose — to be bent this way or that. —

  “You are unhappy,” cried Jermyn. “You, with the one lever which can move the world under your hand. Absurd. If you have wishes, realise them. If any man stands in the way of your desire, buy him. All men are to be bought — that is an old axiom of Prime Ministers — from Wolsey to Walpole — and almost all women. You are a fool to waste yourself upon unfulfilled desires, which mean fever and unrest. You have the peau de chagrin — the talisman of power — in your banking account.”

  “Yes, the peau de chagrin — we may take it as an allegorical figure to represent the power of money in an age of advanced civilisation — but while I possess the power I have to remember the penalty. With every passionate desire fulfilled the talisman shrinks, and the possessor’s life dwindles.”

  “No, my friend, it is our unfulfilled desires that shorten our lives — our ambitions never realised — our hopeless loves. With realisation comes satiety, and satiety means rest. The peril lies in The aching hunger of the wish, not “in its fruition.”

  CHAPTER XV. “A MAN CAN HAVE BUT ONE LIFE AND ONE DEATH.”

  Of all the men he knew, Justin Jermyn was the last whom Gerard would have deliberately chosen for a confidant and counsellor. He had an innate dread of the man, thought him false, tricky, and uncanny, half a charlatan, and half a fiend; and yet he was drawn towards him by such an irresistible magnetism, and was at this time be sorely in need of some friendly ear into which his egotism could pour its complainings, that, after trying to shake off Jermyn by absolute incivility, he ended by walking as far as Barnes Common with him, where they sat on a furzy hillock in the sweltering August afternoon, and smoked and talked in a lazy, desultory fashion.

  So far they talked only of people who were indifferent to both. Jermyn had a scathing tongue about men and women — but, being a man, was naturally most malignant in his estimate of the weaker sex.

  “I believe the generality of men hate all women except the one woman they adore,” said Gerard, meditatively. “There is a natural antagonism in the sexes, as between dog and cat. Turn a little girl loose into a playground of small boys, and if it were not for fear of the schoolmaster, there would be no more of her after an hour’s play than of Jezebel when the dogs ate her. Every boy’s hand would be against her. They would begin by pulling her hair and tripping her up, and then the natural savage in them would go on to murder. Look at the way the Sepoys treated women in the Indian Mutiny! That devilish cruelty was only the innate hatred of the sex which asserted itself at the first opportunity. And your talk about Mrs. Fontenelle and the pretty Miss Vincent is only the civilised development of the same malignity.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Jermyn. “But for my own part I am rather fond of women in the aggregate, as entomologists are fond of butterflies. I like them as specimens. I like to pin them down upon cork and study them, and make my guesses about their future, by the light of their antecedents.”

  “And you do not believe in the unassailable honour of good women?”

  “Not in honour for honour’s sake. There are women who elect to go through life with an unspotted reputation, for pride’s sake, just as an Indian fanatic will hold his arms above his head until they stiffen and wither, for the sake of being looked up to by his fellow-men. But honour for honour’s sake, honour in a hovel where there is no one to praise — honour in the Court of a Louis the Great or a Charles the Little — that kind of honour, my dear Hillersdon, is beyond my belief. Remember I am of the world worldly. My intellect and my opinions are perhaps the natural product of a society in its decadence.”

  “And do you think that a good woman — a woman whose girlhood has been fed upon all pure and holy thoughts, whose chosen type of her sex is the mother of Christ — do you think that such a woman can survive the loss of reputation, and yet be happy?”

  “Assuredly, if she obtain a fair equivalent — a devoted lover, or a life of luxury, with a provision for her old age. The thorn among the roses of vice is not the loss of honour, but the apprehension of poverty. Anonyma, lolling on the silken cushions of her victoria, shivers at the thought that all the luxuries which surround her may be as short-lived as the flowers in the park borders, for a season, and no more. Believe me, my dear Hillersdon, we waste our pity upon these ladies when we picture them haunted by sad memories of an innocent girlhood, of their parish church, the school-house where they taught the village children on Sunday mornings, of brokenhearted parents, or sorrowing sisters. Ways and means are what these butterflies think about when their thoughts travel beyond the enjoyment of the hour. The clever ones contrive to save a competence, or to marry wealth. The stupid ones have their day, and then drift to the gutter. But conscience — regrets — broken hearts! Dreams, my dear Hillersdon, only dreams.”

  A chance hansom took the two young men back to town, and on nearing Queen’s Gate Gerard invited his companion to dine with him. There was nothing new or striking in Justin Jermyn’s discourse, but its cheap cynicism suited Gerard’s humour. When a man is set upon evil, nothing pleases him better than to be told that evil is the staple of life — that the wickedness which tempts him is common to humanity itself, and can not be wicked because it is incidental to human nature.

  They dined tête-à-tête in the winter-garden, where the warm air rustled among the palm leaves, and the atmosphere was full of the scent of roses, climbing roses, standards, dwarfs, which filled all the available space, and made the conservatory a garden of roses. The sliding windows in the lofty dome were opened, and showed a sky, starlit, profound, and purple, as if this winter-garden near Knightsbridge had been some palm grove in one of the South Sea isles. The dinner was perfection, the wines the choicest products of princely vineyards; and Hillersdon’s guest did ample justice to both cuisine and cellar, while Hillersdon himself ate very little, and drank only soda-water. —

  “Fortune, which has favoured you so highly in some respects, has not blest you with a fine appetite,” said Jermyn, when he had gone steadily through the menu, and had even insisted upon a second supply of a certain chaud-froid of ortolans.

  “There is such a baneful sameness in food and wines,” answered Gerard. “I believe my chef is an artist who deserves the eminence he enjoyed with former masters — but his productions weary me. Their variety is more in name than in substance. Yesterday quails, to-day ortolans, to-morrow grouse. And if I live till next year the quails and ortolans and grouse will come round again. The earliest salmon will blush upon my table in January; February will come with her hands full of hot-house peaches and Algerian peas; March will offer me sour strawberries and immature lamb. The same — the same over and over again. The duckling of May — the green-goose, the turkey-poult, the chicken-turbot. I know them all. There is truer relish in a red herring which a working-man carries home to eat with his tea than in all the resources of a French cook, when once we have run through his gamut of delicacies. I remember my first Greenwich dinner — rapture — the little room overlooking the river, the open windows and evening sunlight, the whitebait, the flounder-souche, the sweetbreads, the
iced moselle, food for the Olympian gods! But after many seasons of Greenwich dinners, how weary and hackneyed is the feast!”

  “You have possessed your millions little more than a year, and already you have learnt how not to enjoy,” said Jermyn. “I must compliment you upon your progress.”

  “Ah, you forget, I knew all these things before I had my fortune — knew them in the days when I was only an umbra, knew them in other people’s houses. Money can buy hardly anything for me that has freshness or novelty, any more than it could for Solomon, and I have no Queen of Sheba to envy me my splendour until there is no more spirit in her. Nobody envies a millionaire his wealth nowadays. Millionaires are too common. They live in every street in Mayfair. To be worth anybody’s envy a man should have a billion.”

  “You begin to find fault with the mediocrity of your fortune?” said Jermyn, with his pleasant laugh at human folly. “A little more than a year ago you were going to destroy yourself because you were in pecuniary difficulties — harassed by tailors and bootmakers. In another year you will be charging the same revolver to end an existence that leaves you nothing to live for. Solomon was not so foolish. Indeed, I think that great king was simply the most magnificent humbug that the history of the world offers to the contemplation of modern thinkers — a man who could philosophise so exquisitely upon the vanity of human life, and yet drain the cup of earthly pleasures — sensual, artistic, intellectual — to the very dregs! Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; and, behold! the slave market sends its choicest beauties to the king. Vanity of vanities, and lo! the ships come into poil laden with apes and ivory, with Tyrean purple and the gold of Ophir, for the king; and the building of the mighty temple yonder on the holy hill affords a perpetual interest and an inexhaustible plaything for the man who calls the grasshopper a burden. I’ll wager that in Jerusalem they called that gorgeous temple Solomon’s Folly, and laughed among themselves as the great king’s litter went up the hill, with veiled beauty sitting in the shadow of the purple curtains, and little slippered feet just peeping out among the embroidered cushions. Solomon in all his glory! I think, Hillersdon, if I were as rich as you, the thing I should feel most keenly would be that my money could not buy me back one gleam of the glory of the past — not half an hour with the guerilla leader David, among the wild hills, not one glimpse of Jerusalem when Solomon was king, not a night with Dido, or a dinner with Lucullus. We may imitate that gorgeous past, but we can never recall it. Billions would not buy it back for us. All the colour and glory of life has faded from an earth that is vulgarised by cheap trippers. From Hounslow to the Holy Land one hears the same harsh, common voices. German and Yankee accents drown the soft Tuscan of the Florentine in the Via Tornabuoni, tramloads of Cockneys rush up and down the hills of Algeria, camelloads of vulgarity from London and New York pervade the desert where Isaiah wandered alone beneath the stars. The hill where the worshippers of Baal waited for a sign from their god, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, are as banal as Shooter’s Hill or the Vale of Health. The spirit of romance has fled from our vulgarised planet, and not a milliard of golden sovereigns could tempt her back for an hour!”

  “I should be content to let the past go, if I could be happy in the present. That is the difficulty.”

  “Oh, I am always happy. I have fancies, but no passionate longings. My only troubles are climatic. While I can follow the sunshine I am content.”

  “If you have finished your wine let us go to my den,” said Gerard, who had allowed his companion’s rodomontade to pass by him like the faint breath of evening wind among the palm leaves, while his own thoughts travelled in a circle. “We can’t talk freely here. I feel as if there were listeners in the shadowy cornera behind those tree ferns.”

  “To your den with all my heart.”

  They went upstairs to the room where Gerard’s talisman was fixed against the wall, behind a Japanese curtain. He had not lifted the curtain since the night when he first met Hester Davenport, and when the tremulous line which his pen made upon the paper showed him that a disturbing element had entered into his life.

  To-night he flung himself into his accustomed chair wearily, and a heavy sigh escaped him, as he pushed aside the books upon the table in front of him, and looked at the face of his betrothed in the photograph.

  Jermyn was walking round the room looking at everything with an amused air.

  “So like my old rooms,” he said, “I feel quite sorry as I look at the things. Mine are sold, dispersed, vanished into thin air. I gave up those old Inn chambers — too uncanny for a man of cheerful temperament. I have a pied à terre in Paris now.”

  “What part of Paris?”

  “Ah, I never tell my address. That is one of my idiosyncrasies. But if ever I meet you on the boulevard after the theatres have closed, I will take you to my den to supper, and will give you Margot or Lafitte as good as the Madeira you liked that night in the old Inn. By Jove, my image in black marble! How did you come by it?”

  The image was a bust of Pan, and the features and expression of the god were the features and expression of Justin Jermyn. Allow for the phantasy of goat’s ears, and the bust was as fine a likeness of the Fate-reader as portraiture could have achieved under the happiest conditions.

  “Who is the sculptor?” asked Jermyn, hovering over the bust with childish pleasure.

  “It is an antique from Sir Humphrey Squanderville’s collection, I found it at Christie’s the other day, and I bought it as the best substitute I could get for that black marble bust which I saw in your rooms.”

  “You must be very fond of me, Hillersdon, to have set up my image in your sanctum.”

  “Fond of you! Not in the least. I have a horror of you — but I like your society, as a man likes opium. It has a foul taste, and he knows it is bad for him; yet he takes it — craves for it — must have it. I could not rest till I had your likeness; and now that grinning mouth of yours is always there to mock at my heartache, my doubt, my despair. That broad smile of sensual enjoyment, that rapture in mere animal life, serve me as a perpetual reminder of what a poor creature I am from the pagan point of view — how utterly unable to enjoy life from the Pantheist’s standpoint, how conscious of man’s universal heritage — death.”

  “‘Death is here and death is there,

  Death is busy everywhere,’”

  quoted Jermyn. “Cheerful poet, Shelley; an exquisite harper, but a good deal of his harping was upon one string — death, dust, annihilation. It would have been simply inconsistent if he had lived to be as old as Wordsworth. But why should my image,” posing himself beside the bust, and laying his long white hand affectionately upon the sylvan god’s crisp forelock, “remind you of dismal things? My prototype and I have the spirit which makes for cheerfulness?”

  “Your very cheerfulness accentuates my gloom.”

  “Gloomy! With youth and good looks, and ninety thousand a year.”

  “More than enough for happiness, perhaps, if I had the freehold; but I am only a leaseholder, and I know not how short my lease may be. I have pretty good reason to know that it is not a long one. Yes, I know that, Justin Jermyn. I know that these things belong to me as the dream-palace belongs to the dreamer who fancies himself a king.’’

  “Make the most of your opportunities while they last. To be as rich as you are — and to be young — is to command the world. There is not a flower in the garden of life that you cannot pluck.”

  “You are wrong. I am tied and hampered. I see before me one — and only one — chance of supreme happiness, and yet I dare not grasp it,”

  And then in a gush of confidence, in the passionate egotism that must talk of self, he told this man whom he distrusted the inmost secrets of his heart — told him how he had been moved by the sight of Hester’s face on the platform in the concert-hall, and how from that night he had struggled in vain against the attraction which drew him towards her. He told Jermyn everything — his intrusion upon her life, albeit he knew her desire to avoid all
friends of the past — told of those quiet hours in the humble lodging, those unalarming gifts of flowers and books — told of those slow pacings by the river, with the old father always at her side — pouring out his soul to this man whom he doubted and feared as freely as a girl tells her story of hopeless love to a trusted sister.

  “We have never been alone together since that first night in Eaton Square. I have never dared even to hold her hand in mine with a lingering clasp, and yet when our hands touch there is a fire that runs through my veins, till heart and brain are fused in that passionate flame, and I can scarce shape the words that bid her good-bye. Our talk has been only of commonest things. I have never by look or word dared to express my love — and yet I think she knows I love her. I think that when my heart leaps at the sound of her voice or the touch of her hand her heart is not cold. I have seen her lips tremble in the faint evening light when we have walked side by side under the trees. I have felt that there was eloquence in her silence, in her faltering replies. Yes, I know she loves me.”

  “What more do you want — knowing that? Are you going to leave her at her sewing-machine, when you can make her life one blissful holiday?”

  “She is not a woman to be had for the asking. Would you advise me to fling every worldly consideration to the winds, and marry her?”